Today wireless devices, such as mobile phones, typically support other wireless technologies such as Wireless Local Area Networks, commonly referred to as Wi-Fi, in addition to the cellular standards. As a means to improve the network capacity in future networks, Wi-Fi is intended to be an integral part. That is, Wi-Fi will be regarded as just another radio access technology, so that a connection or handover can be made to Wi-Fi without the user noticing that the service is no longer being carried by 3GPP technologies like WCDMA or LTE.
Presently this kind of handover is controlled by the wireless device, rather than by the network, due to that the Wi-Fi network is still not sufficiently tightly integrated with the cellular networks using 3GPP technologies. However, using Wi-Fi is from a user perspective often preferred, because of the lower cost associated with it. Therefore, a handover is often performed to Wi-Fi as soon as a Wi-Fi network is detected and the signal strength is sufficiently high. Hence, when a wireless device is in range of a Wi-Fi network it will typically connect to this wireless network when the received signal strength indication, RSSI, is sufficiently high, without further analysis.
Prior art published patent application documents US2006025149 and US2006025151 disclose devices performing background scanning for detecting a second network while being connected to a first, to decide, for example, whether to make adjustments to the current level of service being provided, or to switch from use of a first communication network to add or switch to a second communication network. The cited prior art document US2006025149 states that the wireless performance prediction attributes used in such a decision may be based on a signal-to-noise ratio (SNR), a frame error rate, a fading characteristic of the communication link, and a measure of throughput, to name only a few examples.
However, it has turned out that sometimes the actual performance which can be supported by a wireless network, might be poor although the predicted performance is high. One example is that the received signal has a very high level and/or quality, but that the data rate that a user gets once connected to the network is very low. This leaves a high amount of uncertainty to the users, because the Signal Strength Indicator, which is typically displayed in the user interface, will then not correspond to the actual performance. Hence, wireless devices cannot avoid connecting or handing over to wireless networks which cannot provide the required performance. As a result of poor performance, users tend to completely turn off Wi-Fi, which of course overturns the idea of Wi-Fi as a means to improve the performance.